Flodesk vs MailerLite: Choosing the Best Email Marketing Platform
Email marketing is essential for any business looking to build meaningful relationships, drive traffic, and boost sales. But with so many options to choose from, settling on the right platform can feel overwhelming.
In this post, I’ll share an in-depth comparison of two popular services—Flodesk vs MailerLite—to help you determine the best choice for your needs.
Drawing from over 10 years of experience in digital marketing and having switched between various email providers myself, I understand there’s no universal solution. Every business has unique priorities and constraints.
My goal is to outline the core differences between Flodesk and MailerLite across key aspects like:
- User interface and navigation
- Email design capabilities
- Analytics and Reporting
- Campaign automation
- Integrations
- Pricing
- Customer support
By the end, you’ll have a clear sense of their respective strengths and weaknesses so you can confidently decide on the platform that aligns with your goals.
Let’s dive in!
Platform Comparison: How Flodesk and MailerLite Stack Up
While Flodesk and MailerLite share the common goal of powering effective email campaigns, they differ across some key aspects. I’ll break down how the two platforms compare across 7 factors:
User Interface and Navigation
MailerLite: MailerLite has a more traditional interface offering extensive customization options through its drag-and-drop builder, advanced CSS editing capabilities, and wide template selection.
Flodesk – Flodesk’s interface stands out as more intuitive and visually appealing, especially for beginners. The dashboard layout and process flows were designed to guide users seamlessly through creating campaigns.
Email Design Capabilities
MailerLite: MailerLite offers a wide selection of templates and advanced customization options through its drag-and-drop editor. Skilled email designers can truly customize every design
element.
Flodesk – Flodesk promotes a streamlined approach to email design with modern, mobile-optimized templates. The drag-and-drop editor makes it easy to put together attractive emails without coding.
Analytics and Reporting
MailerLite: MailerLite shines with its powerful analytics, offering detailed tracking and segmentation options. You can analyze metrics like open/click rates, unsubscribes, conversion tracking, and subscriber geo-location.
Flodesk – Flodesk focuses its analytics on key campaign metrics in an easy-to-understand dashboard. While less robust than MailerLite, the dashboard provides the essentials for optimizing campaigns.
Campaign Automation
MailerLite: MailerLite enables intricate multi-step workflows based on triggers like form submissions, link clicks, date-based actions, and more. You can get extremely advanced with your automations.
Flodesk – Flodesk focuses on simplicity over complexity with its automation. When contacts join a segment, you can set up actions like sending emails, scheduling delays, adding tags, and more.
Integrations
MailerLite: With over 700 native integrations, MailerLite connects extensively to ecommerce platforms, CRMs, analytics tools, and more. Further integrations are available through Zapier.
Flodesk – Flodesk offers more limited yet straightforward integrations with platforms like Shopify, Squarespace, and Google Analytics. Setting up the connections is simple though.
So in summary, while the platforms align on some basic features, they diverge across interface design, customization capabilities, automation complexity, integrations, pricing models and support channels.
Email Marketing Essentials: Why It’s Vital for Every Business 📧
Before diving deeper into the Flodesk and MailerLite comparison, it’s important to cover why email marketing is so essential for bloggers, entrepreneurs, and small business owners alike.
While most rely on social media for marketing these days, email is still my #1 recommendation for consistently reaching and engaging your audience.
There are 2 primary reasons email outperforms other channels:
👥 Building Strong Relationships
Email allows you to have meaningful, personalized conversations to foster loyalty and trust with contacts over time. You own your list with email – there’s no algorithmic feed limiting your reach.
Through value-driven newsletters and automated campaigns, you guide contacts along their journey with your brand.
💰 Promoting Business and Sales
Email converts because it catches people during their purchasing process. Even if someone isn’t ready to buy now, your messages remind them to eventually return and buy.
Further, email isn’t at the mercy of unstable organic traffic from search engines. As long as you adhere to best practices, you can reliably grow and engage your list.
Ultimately, email helps you control the narrative and consistently nurture relationships – critical for long-term business growth.
🖥️ The Need For Dedicated Software
You could stick to basic ESPs (email service providers) like Gmail, Yahoo or Outlook to send emails…in theory.
But in practice, those providers:
- Offer extremely limited deliverability and may land in spam folders
- Don’t enable essential functions like sign-up forms, automation, advanced analytics etc.
- Will likely suspend your account if sending bulk emails
Hence dedicated software like Flodesk and MailerLite is required to execute professional email marketing initiatives.
Flodesk Overview: A Rising Star for Beautiful Emails ✨
Although Flodesk debuted just a few years ago in 2019, it has quickly captured market share thanks to its beautifully designed templates and intuitive editing experience.
In particular, female entrepreneurs, bloggers, and creative agencies have flocked to Flodesk for its aesthetically pleasing emails. But make no mistake – its features go far beyond just good looks.
Here’s an overview of Flodesk’s core capabilities:
🚀 Key Features
Drag-and-Drop Email Builder: Flodesk’s builder makes putting together professional emails easy with pre-designed blocks, image editing tools, personalized dynamic content and more.
Pre-Designed Templates: Choose from Flodesk’s gallery of stylish, mobile optimized templates across categories like welcome series, product launch, weekly digest etc.
Signup Forms: Create scroll boxes, sticky bars, landing pages, pop ups and other conversion-focused forms to help grow your list.
Workflow Automations: Set up triggers like form submissions, date-based actions etc to send timely, relevant follow ups to contacts automatically.
Analytics: Flodesk provides the essential email marketing metrics like open, click through and unsubscribe rates to optimize your approach.
🎨 Beautiful, Branded Designs
As mentioned, Flodesk’s biggest differential is its gorgeous email template designs focused heavily on visual branding.
Other email services treat design as an afterthought. Flodesk puts it front and center instead.
So if you want to continue showcasing a consistent, aesthetically pleasing brand image with your email campaigns, Flodesk streamlines the process.
💸 Unique Flat Rate Pricing
Most competitors bill you based on number of subscriber contacts, with fees ranging from $10 to $65+ per month.
Flodesk doesn’t care whether you have 500 or 50,000 contacts. They charge around $38 per month flat for full access to the platform.
If you can snag one of their discount codes, you could even cut that monthly cost in half permanently.
This pricing model can save you significant sums compared to scaling up a subscriber-based plan. It removes worry about outgrowing tiers too.
MailerLite Overview: A Trusted Leader Focused on Simplicity 💌
While Flodesk is the new kid on the block, MailerLite has earned its position as an email marketing leader over the past decade.
As one of the very first purely cloud-based platforms, MailerLite won over customers with its ease of use and generous free plan.
Let’s explore some of MailerLite’s key attributes:
📬 Key Features
Drag and Drop Editor: MailerLite’s flexible editor makes creating beautiful emails simple through pre-designed blocks, global image styles, color pickers and more.
Popups / Landing Pages: Grow your list by building unlimited popups, website widgets, and landing pages to capture new leads.
Segmentation and Tracking: MailerLite offers robust segmentation options to divide contacts based on categories like location, purchase history etc. Detailed tracking shows you subscriber engagement analytics with each campaign too.
Automations: Set up sequences to engage customers over time with welcome/incentive messages when they sign up, make purchases and reach other milestones.
Integrations: MailerLite seamlessly connects with ecommerce platforms like Shopify and WooCommerce to track orders and automate customer communications.
💵 Subscriber Based Pricing
As mentioned with Flodesk earlier, most competitors in the email marketing space charge you based on volume of contacts. MailerLite follows the same model, where costs scale up in pricing tiers based on subscriber count.
The free plan includes 1,000 subscribers while paid plans cater up to 100,000+ contacts across four pricing levels, starting at just $10/month. Each tier unlocks additional features too like advanced automations, custom domains etc.
This flexible structure ensures prices stay affordable whether you have a small, medium or large scale audience. You avoid overpaying or underutilizing based on changing needs.
💯 Rave Reviews
With over 1 million satisfied customers globally, MailerLite enjoys distinguished repute as an email marketing leader.
Users praise its easy learning curve for beginners while still offering growth potential for more advanced strategy. The quality and responsiveness of MailerLite’s customer support also earns consistent kudos across reviews.
Pricing Comparison: Flodesk vs MailerLite Cost Structures 💰
Pricing plays a pivotal role when selecting any software platform. In this area, Flodesk and MailerLite take divergent approaches:
Flodesk Pricing
Flat Rate Regardless of Subscribers
Flodesk charges around $38 per month for full access to their platform and features. It does not matter if you have 500 subscribers or 500,000 – the cost stays flat.
Occasionally they offer 50% off discounts which reduce the monthly rate to only $19. Now that’s a steal for unlimited email marketing capabilities.
This pricing model means you get complete predictability and control over your budget. No worrying about upgrading tiers later to accommodate audience growth.
MailerLite Pricing
Scales Based on Number of Subscribers
MailerLite aligns with the traditional model of subscription-based pricing tiers:
- Free: Up to 1,000 subscribers
- Standard: Up to 2,500 subscribers for $10/month
- Plus: Up to 5,000 subscribers for $14/month
- Premium: Up to 10,000 subscribers for $29/month
Additional pricing levels up to over 100,000 subscribers are also offered for larger email programs.
With each tier you gain access to more advanced features. So the pricing adjusts based on needs. Those just starting out can benefit from the free offering while medium to large teams can right-size plans aligned to their growth.
Overall both models have their merits – flat rate vs aligned to usage. Evaluate team goals, audience size and tool needs as you decide between these two capable services.
Features Deep Dive: How Flodesk and MailerLite Compare ⚙️
Now that we’ve covered the fundamentals of Flodesk and MailerLite, let’s examine how their functionality stacks up across 4 key areas:
Newsletter Editor
MailerLite
MailerLite enables both template-based designs as well as custom HTML/CSS coding for complete newsletter customization. Dynamic content blocks make personalization easy.
Flodesk
Flodesk focuses more on template personalization. The drag-and-drop editor simplifies modifying themes but advanced coding control is limited.
Form Building
MailerLite
With popups, embeds, landing pages and website builder, MailerLite offers extensive form creation capabilities to capture leads anywhere.
Flodesk
Flodesk builds scroll boxes, sticky bars, banners and landing pages. While simpler in scope, the forms integrate easily onto sites.
Automation
MailerLite
MailerLite shines with multi-branch workflows, complex triggers and filters, tags, sequences and other robust automation features.
Flodesk
Flodesk takes a streamlined approach, enabling you to set actions based on group subscriptions and dates. It focuses more on simplicity.
Analytics
MailerLite
Granular tracking and live reporting provide rich insights into subscriber engagement and campaign performance in MailerLite.
Flodesk
Flodesk analytics cover email metrics nicely but lacks more advanced segmentation and custom reporting capabilities.
In summary, MailerLite edges out Flodesk on features while Flodesk simplifies the user experience. Evaluate whether advanced or simplified capabilities better serve your unique business needs!
Conclusion and Recommendation ✅
Flodesk and MailerLite both offer tremendous value, albeit in different ways.
Flodesk makes email marketing beautiful through stunning templates and effortless creation capabilities.
The flat rate pricing provides exceptional value too as you scale your list without worrying about expanding costs.
MailerLite stands tall as an email marketing leader focused on simplicity, automation, analytics and integration.
Its free plan enables virtually anyone to benefit from professional features while paid tiers scale up according to usage needs.
So which solution should you choose? Here are some recommendations based on common scenarios:
If You Value Simplicity and Ease of Use
Flodesk’s intuitive editor and simplified functionality reduces the learning curve. Their visually-focused templates accelerate designing attractive emails as well.
If You Have Design/Branding Background
Showcase a consistent, visually enticing brand image in your emails with Flodesk’s stylish templates. Let them do the heavy design lifting for you!
If You Are Cost Conscious About Growing Your List
Flodesk’s unconditional flat rate fee means you pay the same each month irrespective of audience size. With common discounts, you unlock tremendous value.
If You Need Advanced Features Like Complex Automations
MailerLite has more mature capabilities for leveraging behaviour-based triggers, custom coding, and extensive app integrations within your workflows.
If You Value Analytics and Granular Insights
MailerLite’s detailed tracking and segmentation empowers optimizing your approach based on metrics beyond opens and clicks. Flodesk offers streamlined reporting by comparison.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do Flodesk and MailerLite compare for beginners?
Flodesk tends to be better suited for beginners given its simpler editor and interface. MailerLite has a steeper learning curve but offers more growth potential with advanced features.
Can I send email sequences/automations on Flodesk and MailerLite?
Yes, both Flodesk and MailerLite enable the creation of automated email workflows based on triggers. MailerLite has significantly more robust automation capabilities, however.
What types of email list sign-up forms can I build with each platform?
MailerLite offers a wider variety of list-building forms – embeddable widgets, popups, landing pages, and websites. Flodesk focuses on scroll boxes, banners, sticky bars and landing pages.
How many email contacts can I have on Flodesk vs MailerLite?
Flodesk places no limit on contacts. MailerLite offers a free plan with 1,000 subscribers and paid plans catering up to 100,000+ subscribers across varying tiers.
Does Flodesk or MailerLite offer free plans?
MailerLite has a free version supporting up to 1,000 subscribers. Flodesk does not offer an unlimited free plan, but occasionally provides 50% off coupons that significantly reduce costs.
Which platform has better deliverability rates?
A: Both Flodesk and MailerLite utilize deliverability best practices andmaintains stellar sender reputations for inbox placement with major ESPs. Their rates tend to be very comparable.
Can I connect an ecommerce store to Flodesk or MailerLite?
Yes, both platforms integrate with all major ecommerce platforms like Shopify and WooCommerce for order tracking and customer automation triggers. MailerLite offers significantly more integrations overall though.
